Jørgen Sundgot gets down and jiggy with Motorola's latest, music-tuned colour handset, the C350. The verdict? You'll have to read on to find out.
As the second ever colour handset from the manufacturer (excluding the A830 3G phone, which is a rare find), Motorola's most recent low-end offering has a lot to prove. The dual-band GSM 900/1800 MHz C350 sports a good range of features and delivers an impression of overall quality, yet offers uneven performance and is in need of a few improvements - specifically in areas tending to core functionality.
 | Motorola's C350 has one of the smallest colour displays in the world
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The handset itself comes off as feeling somewhat plasticky, much due to the exchangeable covers and its leight weight of 85 g. Further contributing to this is its display, which is extremely small - yet, pleasantly bright and offering 4,096 colours. This can display 4 lines of text and 1 line of icons, which is just barely adequate nowadays.
Ergonomically speaking, the C350's keypad is quite pleasant to use with well spaced and distinct key shapes, which are graced with a comfortable white backlight. Unfortunately, key presses do not always register which is one of two factors contributing to inputting more than small amounts of text quickly becoming an infuriating experience. The other is general OS latency, which by itself is a minor annoyance but adds to the overall frustration when combined with faltering key presses.
Navigating the C350 has both its positive and negative sides: while main menu navigation is slow and jerky (caused by graphic overload), the menus are well thought out and intuitive. A big plus, both soft keys of the handset and the main menu can be customized and reordered to provide quick access to the areas of the phone most used. A big emphasis is placed on personalizing the C350 with embedded themes and ring tones - some of which are quite nice, others of which are apalling - and also download new ones.
Other features of the C350 include pleasantly receptive voice dialing, as well as a calculator, a currency converter and a handy datebook with reminder alerts. A MotoMixer application which lets users design mix their own ring tones in MIDI formats is perhaps one of the most innovative traits of the phone, but patience is required to create something of sufficient quality to pass on to friends and family. Also, a WAP 1.2.1 browser is included - but given the resolution of the C350's screen, browsing is far from a pleasant experience.
From a purely phone perspective, the C350 delivers good audio quality and also offers adequate signal reception. Its GPRS 4+1 data features could perhaps have benefited from the inclusion of an infrared port to allow use of the C350 with laptops, handhelds and the likes, but at least it ensures WAP surfing at a good pace.
Powered by a 600 mAh Lithium Ion battery, the battery life of the C350 is also best described as adequate. Motorola's own numbers claim a standby time of up to 215 hours and a talk time of up to 290 minutes: our tests showed approximately 190 hours and 250 minutes, respectively.
Availability
The Motorola C350 is available throughout most of Europe, and sells in the 175 EUR range.
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